The Reason My Back Went Out

Greetings everyone. Yes I know it’s been a long time since we’ve posted here, and please forgive us. As you may or may not know my wife keeps up fairly regular posts over at cristyslawson.blogspot.com. I’ve realized as of late that I need to be better about keeping everyone updated here.

I won’t go into all of the details of the last 2 months, I simply wanted to relate a funny cultural story. About 2 weeks ago we all few out to Siberia for a conference with the other members of InterAct’s Russia team. It was a great time, and we really enjoyed the fellowship and enlightening talks and discussions. But the last night we were there I threw my back out worse than I have ever done before. We flew back to St. Petersburg the next day, and I was pretty miserable on the 5 hour flight. When we got back I was flat for almost 3 solid days.

Now here’s the funny part. Yesterday after my language lesson I walked into the kitchen at the language institute where we study. The director and several of the other ladies were all sitting around eating a late lunch. I chatted for a minute and told them what had happened with my back. Now I’m fairly certain that the mattress that we slept on when we were at the conference was the culprit, or at least got the ball rolling. I could feel the springs all the way through, it sank in the middle and offered little to no support. So I proceeded to bring this up to the ladies as we chatted. Well, you would have thought I had just said the most ignorant thing known to man because they looked at me like I had monkeys flying out of my ears. One of the ladies spoke up and said “No that can’t be the problem. A mattress can’t hurt your back.” I was speechless. I was totally at a loss for words.

Now, here’s the funny part. You want to know what the REAL reason was? Cold. Yes, that’s right, cold air. You see, where we were was significantly colder than St. Petersburg, and that was the reason.

So now I know better. All you people out there spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on high quality mattresses and pillows for your back problems, you’ve got it all wrong. Go ahead, sleep on rocks, it won’t hurt you one bit. You just need to move to Florida. =)